Social Media as the viral and word of mouth (WOM) marketing.

The word of mouth (WOM) medium provides a “tool” which works as enabler in order to increase reach and speed of the messages. WOM exchange the information through the social media/networks in a global inexpensive publishing tool which reaches who ever want to participate in the Viral Capacity. WOM seems very straight forward and simple to understand yet elusive when we adapt social media technology on top of the consumer’s ability to exchange and engage in issues of products services and brand. According to Lockhorn (2007) WOM campaigns can take off very quietly through niche communities and can be powerfully persuasive or conversely result in an astonishing backlash for a product, brand or services. WOM has a greater impact on product judgments, attitude formation and decision making that formal marketing communications (Herr, Kardes & Kim 1991; Bone 1995). The value of WOM marketing is a joint function of the receiver’s involvement in the communication and the communicator’s creditability (Hass, 1981).

For marketers, understanding how WOM networks differ online is particularly pertinent in terms of Web design and marketing communication strategy. What company marketers have to do is to embracing an empathetic approach during individual interactions and across all marketing touch points which can ignite WOM. All this can be summarized in two words Consumer Empowerment.

Consumer empowerment makes the consumers voice louder in the viral network. Blogs has been created both for going into a Positive Interaction but also to confront and watch companies, ways of conducting their brand and products or for government laws. WOM is fuelled by “positive” interactions across all the company touch points, it happens both on a Macro (Organizational elements, company policies, quality standards etc.)  and Micro (experiences impacted by individual interactions) interactions. The type of Macro/Micro interactions stakeholders have with the company product, service or company brand will have a big impact on whether WOM occurs and whether it will be positive or negative. On an almost daily basis consumers exchange information/ knowledge which can expose cases of corporate misconduct or product defects which forces companies to respond. Web log postings of product and services problems often prompt a form of consumer activism called “blog swarms” (Gillin, 2007).

These blog swarms frequently reach the mainstream media with significant consequence. An example is when Intel launching a new processor and they wanted it to be tested by a group of physicist from Stanford University. These physicists where using their processors for the purpose of calculating the impact of nuclear particles. This gave Intel a problem as these physicist were using

the last decimal in the processor as they needed certainty of the result of the worked they were doing would be positive. The physicist made a blog and started to write that there were a “buck” in the new Intel processor – standard users would never recognise the problem but Intel had to

withdraw the processor from the market as nobody could live with the knowledge of this “buck” in the 37 decimal.

Another interesting development in WOM is the increasing keenness of consumers to become part of the value creation process in terms of being a lead generator. Lead Generation appears when a company delivers on its brand promises, this leads to loyalty and trust from the consumers. When

consumer’s start feeling the trust and loyalty towards a product, a service or a brand they start to exchange their experience and information by WOM to other people they trust and whom they happen to like will become friends; especially if the trust and attraction is reciprocated. This exchange of information will lead to WOM will be translated into referrals and sales leads. The company will then benefit from WOM referrals because these include some inherent trust in the company brand, product or service which is passed on from influencers which are not internal company marketers but genuine costumers or consumers. WOM marketing through social networks could emerge as an important tool in the marketer’s arsenal. That will depend on whether marketers can tame the fundamentally unpredictable and serendipitous nature of WOM without losing what makes it so valuable in the first place – its authenticity (McKinsey, 2010).

This has lead to a positive attitude towards the social media in all its forms and has created a visibility in the field and the term Enterprise 2.0 has also appeared in the literature (Bughin, 2008). Marketers and companies seem willing to engage in social media as part of their marketing strategy (Korica et al., 2006; McKinsey, 2007; Forrester, 2007; Parise and Guinan, 2008). But with anything new it is important to create a set of rules or just learn from experience, so did a number of mid-market companies in the Tech Breakfast Club (2010) lesson learned from using social media is;

Social Media basic rules
Social media must be ingrained in a companies culture, it is not just a strategy
Social media won’t be effective without a very strong content strategy
Before venturing into social media:	Have a plan for how to deal with people making negative interactions about you as a company, product, service or brand so everyone knows who will respond and what actions to take (and not take). Be ready, be quick to respond, and be genuine but recognize there will always be people that will never be happy no matter what you do. Deal with the “haters” (negative interactions) respectfully but focus on those who are positive in order to establish and build a group of followers Train employees taking part on behalf of the company on how to use tools (Twitter, LinkedIn, Face book, blogs etc.) and guidelines  for type of content to share and how to interact with prospects, costumers, partners and others.
When providing content to several different communities, offer exclusive access to some content to one community for a limited time, and exclusive access to other content to another  community for  a limited time, in order to achieve higher perceived value and keep people engaged long-term.
“Happy accidents” are common when experimenting with social media, don’t be afraid to try and test new ideas.

Table 2.6 Social media basic rules

When an enterprise company want to benefit from the new social media structure they have to take into consideration how the interaction is done online from a costumer point of view. That is why new concepts as Consumer 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 appear in the literature and in the marketing concept.

In the following I will open a fling of how Enterprise 2.0 will solve the collaboration and the exchange between consumers/ stakeholders and enterprises.

How the shifting power from enterprise to consumer could be used positiv by the enterprise?

As enterprises now have to face that costumers have gained the social media power the enterprise could as well turn the situation into something positive. Start investing in costumer service and make sure that the purpose with your investment is 100% positive costumers, and remember that your most critical costumer is your best friend as he/she would tell you the truth about your product or service.
Your next investment should be in Social media tools/software which make it possible for you as an enterprise to listen in to what your costumers are talking about on his products. At the same time the enterprise must give his costumers the ability to tell him what he/she need the enterprise to produce - this is a hard situation for the enterprise to loose control, but it will pay off in the long run - cost reduction in development and properly increasing revenue. The enterprise goal with giving the costumer control and influence in the product and service development must be having the costumer working with the innovation so the enterprise can invent a product and service which the costumer will "love" to tell everybody they know about. There are examples of products which costumers will "love" to tell the world about. In the IT world Apple have created computers and phones which are more to the costumer than just products it is part of their identity - they "love" to tell the world that they are part of the community of "Apple lovers". Another product is the new Novo Nordisk insulin product which an American user group started to spread the "loving" on FaceBook how they would loose weight using this new product - and it was significant weight loss.
The third investment you should do as an enterprise is giving your brand back to your costumers in the knowledge of that your would not have a brand without positive and "loving" costumers. You have used a lot of money on communicating telling your costumers what your brand values are! What you should do with costumers "loving" your product, is asking them what does your brand mean to them and what makes them "love"  it and wanting to spread the word all over the world about your product or service.
Would this work outside the perfect world - properly not today - but it will not take long before it would be part of the reality for enterprises so in that perspective it is a good idea to test this concept - and get used to the new conditions we can not turn the clock back can we !

Social Media Networks as a marketing strategy for the enterprise.

A major change from conventional marketing perspective is the shift from persuasion to influence.

Marketers should recognize that engaging social media networks is the best way to communicate with the increasing number of user/consumers who spend considerable part of their time online but marketers should be aware of engaging consumers online has a price of sharing influence. The online consumers are normally hard to reach with traditional push based or mass media based marketing methods (Forrester, 2007). The challenge of social media/ networks is the lack of experience and systematic research on the aptitude and effects of these applications. This means engaging social media/networks as part of a marketing strategy is still a trial-and-error process. The theoretical fundament for working professional with social media/network is limited and herby it is a pioneer job to find ways enterprises and marketers can extract value from social media network. A number of authors have researched in different areas of where social media network has impact on the enterprise business. Swisher (2007) has searched the area of social media on the enterprise media asset management. Craig (2007) has searched the area of social media on learning environments and Anderson (2007) has described the commercial and organizational effect of social media applications. Bernoff and Li (2008) have worked with the different ways enterprise departments can engage social media networks without going into specific applications (Marketing, sales, costumer support, operations). To be able to gather the two approaches it will be good to look at the issues from a dual perspective – from marketing and applications perspective combined. Using the dual perspective we can identify two main ways of engaging the social media networks as part of the company marketing strategy: The Passive and the Active way.

Ways of engaging Social media	Description
The passive way or listening-in.	Using Social media networks as intelligence tool i.e. as source of customer voice and market information
The active way:	Using applications of Social media networks as PR, Direct Marketing and customer influence tool as well as a means for personalizing the customer experience and tapping costumer creativity.

Table 2.5 Using the dual perspective of engaging social media.

The passive way of using social media networks can be recognised as a “top down” (B2C)[1] process where marketers collect intelligence from the consumer from listening to their voices of what they say online about the company, its products and competitors by monitoring the social media networks. This is not something new from a marketing perspective never the less it is important to learn about the experiences the costumers have with the company’s product, brand and services. This way of collecting market information gives the company and its marketers the possibility to minimize the damage by having the opportunity to change/modify the product. Where do the marketers and companies find the voice of the costumers? Online blogs, forums and bulleting boards and even social networks are the places to monitor from a company point of view. What is

most important to know from a company perspective is how valid and credible do the costumers consider these applications. According to Elliott (2002) and Bates et al (2006) research, costumers experiences expressed in forums, blogs and product reviews is considered very credible by other consumers as this UGC[2] become influencer on other consumers attitude to the company and its products can be recognised as “vertical” communication (C2C)[3]. The entire viral exchange of experience and information can be the success or the failure of a products and brands seriously

disrupting costly marketing actions. Doing the listening and collecting of information from costumer’s voice in a professional way can save time and cost in using traditional market research for this purpose.

The active way of using social media networks can be recognised as a “bottom up” (C2B)[4]process where marketers actively engages in a dialog with consumers by launching a corporate blog or discussion forum. What happens in the bottom up process is that marketers do not own the message anymore when the dialog is created with the consumer the persuasion age is over and the new age of influence has started (Douma, 2008). This has been widely used by Steve Jobs CEO of Apple and McDonalds Vice President Bob Langert who both daily post opinions on the corporate blog encourage the consumer to respond and exchange views and opinions. A variant of this strategy is when companies make employees publish content on the corporate blog. In fact content is the new message in social media network channels. According to Eikelmann (Eikelmann et al 2008) the best a company and its marketers can do in this environment is to engage with the consumers through social media network in order to influence the message. This approach requires openness and trust of employee’s capabilities (McAfee, 2006; Bryan et al 2007) and the company’s products and communication – it has to be “pure and clean” when you open up for a dialog. Next to company sponsored blogs a simple low cost way to engage social media as PR is to use a content communities – like a video sharing sites YouTube for distributing advertising material. One thing is for sure companies and their marketers are forced to look for alternative communication strategies to market in the social media environment as advertising literacy and changing consumer behaviour diminish the ROI (Biegel, 2008; Constantinides and Fountain, 2008) These strategies has to be taken into consideration the fragmentation of the market of what will change the rules of targeting into behavioural marketing favour (Meadows-Klue, 2008).

The Shifting power from enterprise to consumer

The changing marketing communications environment                    

It has been shown that people with Social media now have the opportunity to create and share their own brand related content. The user generated content has a direct impact on brand affinity and even sales as consumers tend to trust other consumers over brand and herby enterprises. It was identified in the survey and confirmed in the interview that  Social media is changing the communication processes as the power shifts from enterprise to consumer and the meaning of the message itself is changing – content becomes the message. The survey and the interview have stated that consumers of Social media don’t want a controlled Social media environment from the enterprises the content and the exchange has to go between peers. The survey was confirmed by the interview which tells us that content relevance is the single most important factor for the consumer and therefore becomes important for the enterprise. It was found in the survey that consumers are afraid of loosing time and privacy when participating in social media, but these communication push towards closer relationship with the enterprise and herby greater value for the enterprise why it is likely to outgrow into a monetary relationships. 

The influence of Social media and Web 2.0 applications

In order to summarize on the hypothesis and the findings result from the interview; Social media is a medium for marketing campaigns, but it also tells us that it is of great importance to choose the right application for the right marketing communications goals. As a result it can be concluded that Social media can be a valuable channel to be able to convert the consumer’s attitudes towards the enterprise. In any case, the assumption can be made that communication with Social Media triggers the positive word-of-mouth. In terms of integrating social media the best possible way it is important considering the right channel which is most liked by what type of group of consumers the enterprise has as target group. Second the marketers have to use the suggested framework to compare the best possible application to the marketing objective which suites the purpose of the marketing campaign best. The success stories from an enterprise perspective has in general been created by the independent consumer group discussing a product (Novo Nordisk Victoza insulin product) and exchanging knowledge of the use of the product/service which has created new or different opportunities for the enterprise. As every brand and enterprise is different it has not been possible to find an exact list of what to do on the social media. What will be shown is a framework contending information from a variety of sources to provide a set of guidelines for using social media applications as a marketing framework for enterprises.

How to get succes with Social Media in a Corporation

Before you start using Social Media as part of your marketing tool box, make sure it fit the overall company strategy for communicating with your costumers;

Social Media has its limitations. It can not encompass all of the business marketing. The limitations of social media can be placed in the following 3 areas;

• Social media marketing doesn’t drive sales
• Social media marketing can be a time consuming waste of resources
• Social media marketing takes a lot of time and attention to do correct

Social media marketing doesn’t drive sales

The idea of social media marketing is not to hard sell the products or services. The main purpose is to interact with costumers/consumers and make them feel they are part of the company brand and company. The idea is that social media should lead members, followers and friends to places where they can learn more about company products and services – not hard selling products or services.

Social media marketing can be a time consuming waste of resources

With social media marketing it is very easy to spend too much time posting and interacting with people than you spend doing more productive work. Social media marketing can therefore be a very time consuming and waste of time if you have not the correct perspective on the use of social media marketing.

Social media marketing takes a lot of time and attention to do correct

Social media marketing can be a waste of business marketing resources if your business is not carefully taking care of the value of time used. Social media isn’t something one can create and forget, either. Social media requires constant attention to interact with others and drive traffic to the company blog profile or other social media. Social media marketing requires long term thought and dedication, be prepared to dig in for the long haul.
When you have taken the above into consideration don´t hesitate to start using Social Media and if you want to start and try with as little risk as possible use the framework in this blog to get some experience with the various tools of Social Media;

The above framework identifies the combinations of marketing objectives and online applications available for an enterprise company. At the same time the framework identifies the usability of each application type in reaching the marketing objective and herby be able to fulfil the business strategy for the enterprise. The framework is meant to be a quick guide for decisions makers to use social media in a beneficial way for the enterprise company. The usability has been created during my research of the topic of Web 2.0 and social media use in enterprise companies. This is a guide and not a complete list of how to use the various social media applications in the marketing objectives. The best way is to try by your self and look into what works and what don´t, and use the quick guide as a tool for you to try the various combinations.